Steve's Blog (4)

ParallelGraphics starts beta-testing of Cortona3D Viewer 6.0 Beta (previously known as Cortona VRML Client) and invites participants to take part in the beta testing program. Cortona3D Viewer is a fast and highly interactive VRML viewer that is ideal for viewing 3D models on the Web. It works as a VRML plug-in for popular Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome.

Cortona3D Viewer 6.0 Beta homepage -


Download Cortona3D Viewer 6.0 Beta -


Cortona3D Viewer v. 6.0 Beta: What’s new

Unicode support

Cortona3D Viewer 6.0 provides full support for UTF-8 in VRML.

Localization of the user interface

Now the menus of Cortona3D Viewer can be easily translated into other languages by licensed users.

Latest Web browsers support

Cortona3D Viewer now supports Mozilla Firefox v. 3.0 and Google Chrome.

Phong lighting support

The support for Phong lighting model is provided for graphical cards supporting the shader model v. 3.0 and higher. Limited support for the shader model v. 2.x is also provided.

Improved performance: new DirectX renderer

- Support for real-time anti-aliasing (multisampling).
- Support idle-time anti-aliasing by means of Direct3D.
- Support for composite textures.
- Improved processing of textures and 3D primitives.

Improved installation procedure

The use of Microsoft Installer (MSI) allows for easier installation of Cortona3D Viewer within an enterprise and as a part of third party applications.

New VRML extensions

- The Transform2DEx node allows for positioning layers on the screen and specifying their size in pixels.
- The CompositeTexture3D and CompositeTexture2D nodes allow for adding composite textures to the 3D scene.
- The GradientBackground node allows for creating horizontal or vertical gradient background that is static relatively to the camera movements.

Changes in VRML Automation interface

- Pick method has been changed:
Layers without background: areas with no geometry are considered transparent for the picker.
One-sided surfaces: invisible side is ignored by picker.
Double-sided surfaces: the normal calculation is based on a visible side of the surface.
- New method of geometry bounding box calculation:
§ Now the bounding box can be calculated in global coordinates.


The FreeWRL team have put FreeWRL 1.21.2 on-line, with source, debian (.deb) and Apple OSX dmg downloads.

http://freewrl.sourceforge.net

Summary of changes:
- Verified MIME types for OSX and Linux plugins.

- Classic VRML/X3D parser:
- fixed memory error when IS fields were large.
- dramatic speed improvement in PROTO expansions; visible when large protos are
instantiated.

- XML parser:
- speed increase in parsing attribute values (one test shows 100x speed increase)
- PROTO expansion and Script invocation being reworked - may still have parse errors.
(in progress)

- Source Code:
- OpenGL Shaders code should compile on OpenGL 1.5 and above now (was 2.0 and above)
- CFuncs/sounds.h - include unistd.h on Linux machines.

- Misc rendering changes:

- Javascript, direct writing to scenegraph, boolean values were not correctly translated from
javascript to freewrl internal values.

- FaceSets with Color node, not taking material properties correctly (especially transparency)

- FaceSets, with RGB Color node, keep track of associated material transparency, and work through
color node changes.

- removal of temporary files - code has been reworked, as some temporary files (specific:
files retrieved by wget or curl) were not removed.

- initial work on CubeMapTextures.

- GeoPositionInterpolator - output value not translated to local spatial units. (fixed)